So the ACCC has launched the new "GroceryWatch" site, GroceryChoice, which gives
comparisons of a basket of goods between supermarkets. I wonder how
hard it would be to game this system, if you could work out what was
in each basket? Dropping the price of a single item could have a big
impact.

UK retailers do this with what they call "known value items", such
as milk, bread, eggs and bananas. Customers know how much these
normally cost, so by dropping the prices on just those items,
customers get the illusion of cheap prices and get stung on the prices
of goods they can't so easily compare.

The best news from the supermarket inquiry is that the government
will bring in mandatory unit pricing reporting. I wrote to the NSW
fair trading minister about this a few years ago, with the response
that there wasn't demand or need. Unit pricing means the supermarket
shelves will tell you the price per standard unit, for example price
per 100ml or 100g. Next time you're in a supermarket, compare the
prices of 400g and 800g cans of tomatoes. The 800g cans cost more
than double the price of a 400g can.

The site itself seems fairly well designed, though the colour
scheme isn't ideal. Yellow-on-green isn't really ideal. There's a
"latest
news" and "subscribe"
option but no RSS feeds?

The papers managed to find
someone prepared to moan about the site, because he has vision and
mobility problems. Sorry Mr Kerr, it's not the web designer's job to
show you how to turn on the disability options of your software.
They've done everything that they should (though the colour choice
isn't helpful) to make it easy for you. Learn where the options for a
user-defined stylesheet and minimum font-size are, and use them.
Better yet, I bet you're using Internet Exploder. Try Firefox and see
the zoom option -- it rocks! (Ctrl + and Ctrl - or Ctrl and the mouse
wheel). If you still need more help, there are other tools
that will help.